


sore-ring to cope

by flybbfly



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Break Up, F/F, Getting Back Together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 05:51:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8878429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flybbfly/pseuds/flybbfly
Summary: Far-future fic. Nicky and Erik are finally getting married, which means the Foxes are about to have a mini-reunion in Germany. That'd be great, except that Allison hasn't talked to Renee in nearly a year.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [happyg_rl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/happyg_rl/gifts).



> Word of warning: I completely ignored the extra content's depictions of the Foxes post-college. 
> 
> Also, if you've read fic by me before, you know this is a format I am obsessed with. 
> 
> happyg_rl, I really hope you enjoy this!

The nice thing about Matt living with her is that they always have clean towels.

“Seriously,” Allison says across a plate of eggs. “You've revolutionized my bathroom routine. I think you've saved me, like, twelve hundred dollars this month alone.”

It's also nice that she has company again. It was hard moving out here at first, when the only people she socialized with were her teammates, when she realized the stadium is twenty miles outside of Chicago and Chicago's traffic is oppressive enough that trying to live there and drive out every morning would make her commute two hours long each way, down a highway loaded with other east coast transplants who can't imagine not living within two minutes of everything from a grocery store to a drag club, past suburban high schools where teenagers smoke to rebel and ride their shitty bikes to abandoned parts of the woods to make out or whatever it is suburban teenagers do to break away from the ugly monotony of their every day lives.

Her life hasn't changed much. She lives in the suburbs now, too, a fifteen minute drive away from practice in a big ugly house she doesn't need and can't be bothered to clean herself. She only really sees her teammates and her therapist. At least the latter isn't an exy player.

“And here I thought you were getting sick of me,” Matt says. “But that's a joke, right? You're not buying a new towel every day?”

“Well, two new towels a couple of times a week. I just keep forgetting to have the laundry sent out, and the service in this part of the country is so _slow_ —I keep forgetting I don't live in California or New York anymore.”

“Don't give me that shit,” Matt says, grinning. “We went to school in South Carolina together for five years. You're not fooling me.”

Allison laughs as Matt collects their plates. 

“We're flying to Stuttgart first class, just so you know,” Allison says. “Upgrade courtesy of the Reynolds estate.”

Matt snorts. “You don't think our world class exy contracts could've afforded it?”

“Don't complain. I just saved you, like, a thousand dollars.” And gotten herself an angry text from her parents that delighted her—an affectation, she thinks, she should really have grown out of by now. Maybe she's no better than the smoking suburban teenagers, although, she thinks, at least she's not riding a shitty bike.

“Right.” Matt unplugs his phone and follows Allison out to her car. 

“Why are we even going to practice today if we're just going to leave the country for four days this afternoon?” Allison says, pulling out of their driveway anyway. “Makes no sense. We should've asked for today off too.”

Matt fiddles with the radio, trying to pick between bad college stations and top 40. Allison pushes his hand away when it lands on a song she likes. “I'm still the new guy. I don't want to push it.”

“I'm second string defensive dealer,” Allison says. “They could've gone without me, I think.”

“Don't sell yourself short. I heard a rumor you're set to be captain in three seasons.”

“I don't want to stay in the Illinois suburbs for three more years, Christ. Entire genres of music are dedicated to hating this exact environment.”

“You just made us listen to three Katy Perry songs in a row. What do you know about music genres?”

“You'd be surprised,” Allison says. “I'm very cultured.”

They're coming up on the end of the season, anyway, and there are rumors of interested teams back on the east coast, near actual cities. Philly's in need of a new defensive dealer, and Dan coaches at Penn; Neil's in Atlanta with Andrew, and Allison's sure both would put in a good word for her. Allison's agent even mentioned New York, “your old teammate Renee,” and Allison isn't opposed to playing with Renee again, of course she's not, but they last time they saw each other they weren't exactly getting along, so—

She forces herself not to think about it and adjusts her rearview. Seattle might be in need of a new dealer, too, and their stadium's actually within city limits. Allison checked. She doesn't _like_ Seattle all that much, but rain has to be better than Chicago's relentless, neverending winters, how quiet the city and its suburbs get around mid-October, seasonal affective disorder kicking in as soon as the Cubs get knocked out of the playoffs and only loosening if the Bears or Blackhawks are having a particularly good season. As for exy—well, Chicago's team has been hovering around the middle of the central division for the past two seasons, and while they're on the cusp of making playoffs, no one expects them to last very long. 

It just fucking sucks here, and Allison can't stand it.

Next to her, Matt hides a smile like he can tell what she's thinking—which, Allison supposes, he probably can. 

“Fuck off,” she mumbles, and Matt laughs.

*

They fly out of Chicago with a layover in Munich, and Allison drags her window closed as soon as they're in the air so she doesn't have to watch Chicago through it, half wishing she could've found some degree of success there—it's a great city, not that she'd know—and half hoping she gets kidnapped by German pirates or something so she never has to go back.

The flight from Munich to Stuttgart doesn't even have first class, and Allison complains about this loudly to a Matt who has somehow only gotten more easygoing with success.

“Who's picking us up?” Matt says, waiting with Allison at the baggage carousel. For their four day trip, he brought a carryon and a laptop bag; Allison brought a carryon, purse, and all fifty pounds worth of luggage the airline promised her. It's a habit of hers to overpack when traveling, both because she likes variety in her wardrobe and because she likes to be prepared for everything. Including, this time, hopefully getting stranded off the Autobahn in a Volkswagen or whatever and having to rebuild her life from the bottom up in a German forest. 

“Neil and Andrew.”

“Really?” Matt's grinning. “So obviously I miss Neil, but weirdly I kind of miss the monster too?”

“Funny how that works,” Allison says. 

Matt's phone vibrates. “Dan and Renee are here,” he says. “Meeting us at the terminal doors.”

“You can go ahead,” Allison says. “I know you've been dying to see Dan for weeks.”

Matt beams at her. “You sure you're okay here?”

“I can manage.”

“Bag won't be too heavy?”

“I play professional exy, Boyd.”

Matt positively cackles, and then practically bounds away toward the doors.

Allison's bag shows up ten minutes later, a little scuffed from the long voyage but otherwise none the worse for wear. She lugs it down an escalator and then across the terminal to where she can see three familiar bodies standing. Matt and Dan look like they haven't taken a moment to breathe since they saw each other, which means Allison has nowhere to look but at Renee. 

They haven't seen each other since that blowout almost a year ago after the former Foxes' annual summer getaway. Renee looks the same, mostly. Her hair's closer to silver than blond, and she's grown it out more than usual, so that it's brushing her shoulders. The ends are pink. She's dressed in her usual nun-wear, a black long-sleeved sweater and a black skirt and tights and mary janes, which shouldn't be attractive but somehow is anyway. Allison stares at the shoes to avoid looking at Renee's face. How often do grown women wear mary janes? It's an odd affectation, Renee's sense of style, like she's still play-acting the role of good Christian girl.

“Hello, Allison,” Renee says, and Allison's eyes snap back up to her face anyway.

“Renee,” Allison says. 

“You look well.”

“Thanks,” Allison says, voice definitely sounding way higher pitched than usual. “So do you.”

Renee's smile goes a little wry at that, which isn't new exactly—she was definitely capable of wryness toward the end—but is new enough that it makes Allison's throat feel a little tight. “Really? You don't have the urge to take me shopping right now?”

“Stuttgart's supposed to have an excellent shopping outlet, and I've got an exy paycheck with your name on it.” For now, anyway—Allison's floundering, her season's almost definitely going to be over within the next couple of weeks while everyone else dukes it out for the Day Cup, and she hasn't started a meaningful game in months. 

Renee must be following her career, because she looks a little pitying at that. Or maybe Allison's just projecting. Renee's season isn't going all that well, either, but a substitute goalie is one of those positions that's almost always deployed strategically. Not because the starting goalie's tired, but because the opposing team plays different in the second half, or they have a striker who's a different height or has a different style, or maybe they're one of those teams that plays better in the second half and so need a fresh goalie. 

Defensive dealer's not like that. It's an unlikely position anyway, as few teams want to start playing defensively, and more often than not Allison gets shoved in there midway through the first half when Chicago are already down a few goals and then gets told to not let the opposing team let any more goals in. 

“Okay,” Renee says.

“Yeah?” Allison says, accidentally injecting too much hope into her voice.

Renee doesn't answer, and their strange interaction is broken up by the arrival of their ride. Neil and Andrew show up, Neil in an exy jacket and Andrew in all black, and they're a unit the same way they have been almost since the beginning, less Neil and Andrew and more NeilandAndrew.

One half of the pair lets Allison hug him hello, hugs her back, asks her about Chicago.

“Not quite Chicago,” she says. “But it's okay, yeah.”

“When are you coming back east?” Neil says. “We need a defensive dealer.”

“Starting or sub?” Allison says, and she's expecting Neil to laugh or shrug her off, but it's Neil, so he says, “Depends on how good you are the rest of the season.”

“You won championships with me behind you,” Allison says.

“And maybe I will again.” His fingers twitch as if for a cigarette, but then he pulls car keys out of his pocket. Andrew reaches over from where he's greeting Renee and plucks the keys out of Neil's hand.

“Minyard,” Allison says.

Andrew gives her a nod. They've barely interacted other than through Neil since college, and even then their relationship was stilted—Andrew never liked her, never liked anyone other than Neil really, and she didn't have the patience to deal with his shit either. Not to mention that time he almost killed her. Not that she holds a grudge.

She piles into the back of his rental with Matt, Dan, and Renee nonetheless, a sleek black German monstrosity that wouldn't look out of place chauffeuring celebrities from appearance to appearance in Manhattan. She's never understood Andrew's thing for expensive cars considering he has relatively cheap tastes everywhere else. Maybe he just likes that they can drive fast.

The car ride is loud like it always is when the Foxes get together again, all of them catching up, but it's different this time: Matt and Dan have been apart for longer than usual and so are sitting too close together in the very back, which leaves Allison and Renee in the middle row, trying to keep their conversation from being too awkward and stilted. Andrew is silent in the driver's seat, preoccupied with the stick shift and pretending none of them actually exist. Neil is half turned around, catching them up on what's been going on since they got to Germany the night before (“You should've seen Kevin at duty free, you'd think he didn't have a multimillion dollar salary before sponsorships”), but he's not enough to make up for the chasm between her and Renee.

“You two good?” Neil whispers when they get out of the car in front of a hotel that's more to Allison's taste than she would have expected—but then, half her friends are very rich exy players.

“Yeah,” Allison says.

“So you're back to being …” but he lets the sentiment trail off, like he's not sure what he's asking.

“We haven't really talked, to be totally honest with you.”

“Oh,” Neil says. “Shit.”

“It's fine,” Allison says, and then surprises herself into laughing. “Look at that. I sound like you.”

Neil looks a little confused at that, but he hauls one of Allison's bags over his shoulder, takes Matt's carry-on, and follows Andrew into the hotel.

*

They're drinking, of course, because that's the only way all of them ever could get along with each other, getting drunk and pretending they aren't all only still in contact with one another thanks to a tenuous bond forged by some odd combination of sport and trauma when they were all too young to realize that, yes, they were very much in danger of dying every time Neil ran his stupid mouth in front of that murderous asshole but old enough to know when they'd managed to survive something lethal.

At least having Erik and his friends there balances out all the crazy the former Foxes still have clinging to them, shadow-like, looming somehow longer in the day. Most of them speak English, and enough of them follow international exy to be interested in Kevin and Neil, at least. The conversation is cheerful and free-flowing, and they discuss easy topics like exy and other sports and avoid more contentious ones, like politics or anything that happened to them when they were in college.

Allison, meanwhile, flirts with one of the cuter ones. He's a Turkish transplant who went to university with Erik and is now having the time of his life living in Berlin, only in town for the wedding. 

“Us too,” Allison says. “It's funny, actually. I didn't realize Nicky actually liked us enough to invite all of us to this thing, but who wouldn't want their badass professional athlete former teammates at their wedding, right?”

“Are you serious?” the guy says. “Nicky's obsessed with you. You _are_ the same Allison Reynolds who punched his cousin in the face, right?”

And subsequently almost got murdered, Allison thinks, casting a dark look toward an Andrew who looks as completely unconcerned with her as he ever has. He's stirring his drink with his straw and leaning his chin in his other hand, but he's not fooling anyone. Allison's willing to bet he has at least four knives on him right now.

“The very same.”

“Nicky showed us videos of you. You're pretty aggressive on the court.”

Nearby, Renee isn't watching them in that way she has of not-watching someone when she's really paying extremely close attention to them. Allison stirs her drink with a straw and looks back at the guy.

“That's how you win,” she says.

The guy inches closer, drapes an arm around the back of her chair. “Just on the court?”

“Anywhere where winning's involved,” Allison says. She meets Dan's gaze a few seats down. “Excuse me.” 

Dan gets up when Allison does, carrying two drinks into the bathroom with her.

“That guy is cute,” Dan says.

“Whatever,” Allison says. 

“You going to explain why exactly you're talking to him and not Renee?”

“It's not, like, an explicit thing,” Allison says. “Earlier you were talking to Matt and not Nicky. That mean you hate Nicky?”

Dan looks unimpressed with Allison's half-hearted logic. “Reynolds. Stop trying to hide stuff from me. You've always been shit at it. What exactly happened?”

“We broke up,” Allison says. “That's what happened.”

“I didn't even realize you were, like, fully together.”

Allison finishes the drink Dan brought her in one gulp. Dan raises an eyebrow.

“We were together,” Allison says. “Now we're not. I don't need or want to talk about it.”

Dan fixes her with a long, perplexed stare. In college, it used to work wonders on Allison; now, she looks away and at her expression in the mirror, irritated. She digs her lipstick out of her purse and reapplies just to give herself something to do. It's the wrong shade—red as opposed to the magenta she wore here—but she admires the effect anyway.

When they sit back down at their table, the guy has moved on to Neil (who still can't tell when he's being flirted with, apparently, and next to whom Andrew's face is growing steadily more blank), and Renee glances up.

Allison has to be imagining it—wishful thinking is a hell of a drug, and so is the amount of alcohol she's consumed tonight—but she's sure, _sure_ that Renee's gaze lingers on her mouth.

*

One of Allison's first rebellions against her parents was learning to pick all the locks in their mansion and breaking into rooms she wasn't technically supposed to be in. She likes the idea of herself with lock picking tools tucked into her hair instead of bobby pins, and though these days it almost always actually _is_ bobby pins in her hair, she does sometimes drunkenly regress into that angry twelve year old.

Like, for example, right now: the lock to Renee's German hotel room is not nearly as secure as one would hope for it to be, and it takes a very drunk Allison very little effort to let herself in.

In the next moment, she's slammed against the door and there's metal pushing into the base of her neck.

“ _Renee_ —”

“Allison?”

“Yeah, sorry, shit—it's just me.”

It's too dark to see Renee's face, but she moves the knife.

“You're carrying knives again?” Allison says.

“It's been—not the best year.” Renee steps back, but in the dim light, the line of her body is still tense, wary. “What's wrong? What happened?”

“Nothing,” Allison says. “Nothing, sorry I startled you—” It's odd to think that she's never felt this unsure of herself in her entire life. “I just—I just couldn't sleep.”

The subtext— _please don't make me leave_ —is there between them even if Renee is too nice to acknowledge it. The last time Allison let herself into Renee's room in the middle of the night, they were on the verge of breaking up and the room wasn't just Renee's, it was both of theirs, and Allison was back late after a night out drinking with her team. Renee was pissed in that quiet way of hers. Allison was terrified and loud about it.

“What happened?” Renee says again. 

Allison's eyes have adjusted more now—she can see that Renee's face has that special stillness it gets sometimes, that her fingers are still tight around the knife she's apparently taken to by her bed again like it's their freshman year and Andrew Minyard hasn't taken them off her hands yet.

“Nothing. I'm sorry.”

“It's all right.” Renee's fingers find themselves to Allison's, and Allison grips back too tightly, but Renee doesn't budge. That's been Renee, always, Allison thinks—stronger than she looks, secretly a killer, a good person precisely because she thinks she isn't.

“Renee,” Allison says, and it comes out choked. “I'm sorry.”

“I said it's okay.”

“No, I mean—for everything. I was wrong. This wasn't—easier.” It wasn't worth it, she wants to say, and her new team's exy stadium isn't even in Chicago, and pretending they were breaking up because of long distance and not because neither of them ever really healed properly from all the shit that happened when they were in college was stupid and wrong and fucked up, and she should've told Renee all this a year ago instead of right now. 

Renee unwinds her fingers from Allison's.

“You thought it would be better if we were apart,” Renee says. “Was it?”

“No.”

There's silence between them for a minute, and Allison doesn't know how to say thank you for everything, and I'm sorry about everything, and I still love you, and moving to Chicago was a mistake, and I wish we were still together because when we were it felt a lot less like I was trying to force myself to be okay and a lot more like it was actually starting to happen, so instead she says, “Was it for you?”

“Yes,” Renee says, and she's always been an awful liar. It stings anyway, all the way to the tips of Allison's fingers. “Do you want to spend the night with me?”

“Yes,” Allison says.

They lie side by side in Renee's bed, facing each other, not touching. 

Allison wakes up first, too early, head a foggy mess, throat dry, bladder achingly full. She and Renee still aren't touching, but both their hands are up near their pillows, inches apart. 

She considers bridging the gap, but it's been a year, and they're both different now, and when they held hands last night it must have been more because Renee was trying to ground her than anything else.

Instead, Allison goes to the bathroom, rinses her face, brushes with her finger and Renee's toothpaste, and then ducks away to her own room.

*

When they broke up it was for the following reasons:

1\. Allison has watched her former teammates struggle through long distance relationships since graduation. She saw Dan, alone in the outskirts of D.C. at her first coaching job, withdrawing, throwing herself so fully into her career that it was often hard to get hold of her; she saw Neil his senior year at PSU, snappish and angry in a way he hadn't been since she first met him; she saw Nicky, all those years in college, desperate to make connections and going eerily still every time he thought no one was looking. To inflict the same on Renee for the sake of little other than the advancement of her own career seemed cruel, and it was clear they weren't going to be sold somewhere where they could continue living in the same apartment, halfway between two stadiums.

2\. She's pissed about it, overwhelmingly consumed with anger about it, but Riko Moriyama's ghost looms large in her rearview. She feels still like she never fully healed from everything he put them through that year at PSU, and she needed the time to herself to try and recover from it. After that year, everything was exy, ensuring she was good enough to play professionally, putting all the shit with Seth and Riko and her family and the fucking Japanese mob into a box in her head she never accessed. It was unhealthy, and it caught up to her, and she had to deal with it. She shouldn't have alienated Renee or the rest of her friends, and it was a selfish choice, but fleeing the east coast and putting herself through daily therapy has done wonders for her mental health. It was the right thing to do, except that it's destroyed the one relationship she valued with one of the only people who can understand all of her shit.

3\. And this is the worst one, but—Allison's career is floundering, has been for the last year and a half. She's been angry again, the same way she was angry before, when she first signed with PSU and started dating Seth and fighting all the seniors who had no interest in playing with a girl. The same way she was angry after Seth died, the same way she felt her insides freeze solid as soon as Andrew whispered in her ear what really happened to Seth. It helped for a while, helped get Allison through the motions, helped her hone her body and her game, turned her into a weapon instead of a person, but that anger has faded and so has her motivation for the sport. And instead it's been replaced with this other anger, directed inward, pissed that she hasn't lived up to her own expectations for herself. Constant, there in the way she closes cabinets—too hard, Renee still and silent in the background while Allison makes an attempt at cooking; there in the way she drives, fingers too tight on the steering wheel, too likely to cut someone off out of sheer spite; there in the way she fucks, too, and Renee turns Allison away more often than not (“Not like this.” “Renee—” “No.”). Being with someone else, putting anyone through her anger, would've been worse than breaking up with them. Allison's convinced of that. Renee convinced her of that, all those empty stares when she thought Allison wasn't looking, the way she started cooking more like Allison didn't know she was making pico de gallo and tuna tartare from scratch just because it involved so much careful knife work.

(“We don't have to break up so you can go to therapy,” Renee said quietly that last time they saw each other, a sudden calm after the blowout that preceded it, Renee getting that Andrew Minyard look on her face. “I go to therapy, and we're still together. Andrew goes to therapy, and he and Neil don't have any issues.”

“Don't compare us to them,” Allison said. “We're not like them. We're not—” Damaged, she didn't say, but of course they _were_ —because otherwise why would Renee wear that cross around her neck, more like a reminder than a symbol of faith, and why would Allison keep an old lighter in her nightstand drawer, a totem instead of a tool? 

But Renee knew her well enough to guess at the last word, always has, always will, and she said, “That isn't fair. To us or to them.”

“I don't know how to deal with this in a way that doesn't hurt you,” Allison ground out.

“You don't even want to try?”

“Frankly?” Allison said. “No.”

And that was that.)

*

“I'm sorry too, you know.”

They're at the wedding reception, Renee's fingers wrapped around the stem of a champagne glass that's filled with sparkling cider or some other disgusting approximation of celebratory non-alcoholic beverage, Allison taking a seat after too long dancing. Her feet hurt, something she wouldn't ever say out loud to anyone except for maybe Renee, before, back when Renee was encouraging her to show her softer side. Allison's drinking actual alcohol, whiskey courtesy of the open bar Nicky was somehow able to afford.

“For what?” Allison says. 

“I think that I stayed quiet for too long, and you did not get the support you needed from me.”

“Jesus, Renee, don't do that.” Allison's pissed all over again, suddenly, holding her glass too tightly. “Don't tell me you've spent the last year blaming your _self_ because _I_ couldn't handle my own shit, I mean—” She finishes the whiskey. “ _I_ couldn't deal with the idea of a long distance relationship. _I_ couldn't deal with being pissed, and anxious all the time, and scared, and like—” She stands up in frustration, ignores the twinge in her feet and Renee's knowing look downward. “Renee, I loved you, and I couldn't deal with it on top of everything else.”

“What about now?” 

“What _about_ now? I'm still stuck in Chicago, and you're still on the east coast, and we'd probably never be close enough to actually get together, so we'd have to put up with, like, Skype dates. And on top of that, I'm still a mess, and you can't tell me _you're_ doing so hot considering you're literally keeping a knife by your bed—”

“Under my pillow,” Renee corrects.

“What?”

“I keep it under my pillow.”

“ _What_?” Allison collapses back into her chair. “Renee, what the fuck _happened_?”

“I was alone,” Renee says. “I thought—but I was alone for the first time since I was a teenager. I am not sure why I didn't expect it, but I did not, and so—” she shrugs, like this is the kind of thing to just shrug at, keeping a knife under her pillow, like it's a comfort instead of regression, like it's anything other than a sign of what Renee spent so long trying to escape. “It makes it so I can sleep.” 

“Renee.”

“You have not answered my question yet.”

“What question?”

“What about now?”

“What?”

“You said you loved me, but you could not deal with it. And now?”

“And now—” Allison considers it. A year's worth of therapy, several months of living alone and hating it plus living with Matt and thinking it's marginally more tolerable. Is she better? Is she capable of being better? “I don't know.” 

“Me neither,” Renee says. She lets her head drop onto Allison's shoulder. “I miss you.”

Renee smells like her usual perfume, a gift Allison gave her that first Christmas together in South Carolina and then turned into a holiday tradition. She hasn't finished her last bottle yet. Allison feels dizzy, the scent, the knowledge of how close it all is, the alcohol, the exhaustion—

“I miss you, too,” she says.

Renee's head is heavy and warm on Allison's bare shoulder, her skin soft. Her jaw works, revealing stress even in this comfortable position, and Allison gives in and leans over to wrap an arm around Renee's waist. 

It's the most contact they've had in a year, and Allison feels like she's breathing for the first time.

“How's your season going?”

Renee's intake of breath is sharp; Allison knows because she feels how suddenly Renee moves under her fingers. 

“Poorly,” Renee says.

“Same.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don't know,” Allison says. “Take a pay cut. Try to move back to the east coast, or maybe out to California or Seattle.”

“Seattle need a new goalie. Turner's retiring.”

“And rumor has it their starting dealer's going to Kansas City.”

“Wouldn't that be nice?” Renee says. “Playing on the same team again?”

It's wishful thinking: neither of them is good enough to start for Seattle. But Allison pulls Renee closer. “Or just living on the same coast again.” 

Renee pulls away, stares into her glass of fruit juice. “I'm going to go dance,” she says, and she does, wandering off to find Andrew.

Dan rescues Allison from sitting at the table and drinking more whiskey, swinging her around the room and chattering about exy.

Allison spends the rest of the night there, with Dan and sometimes Matt and sometimes Nicky, forcing herself to smile for photos and post things on Instagram when all she wants to do is crawl into bed with Renee.

*

Allison has her hotel room TV tuned to something mindless, late night reruns of one of those reality shows that doesn't even have interesting drama, just rich white people who remind her a little bit of her parents' friends throwing parties and redecorating their homes. She's mostly sober now, though she's been debating popping open the minibar and just going to town on whatever's in there, and she's just about to make herself a rum and coke when there's a knock at the door.

There's only one person it could reasonably be at this hour. Allison opens the door.

“I,” Renee says.

Allison lets her in. Renee sits down on the edge of Allison's bed, all stiff shoulders and tense mouth, and Allison says, “What if we just say fuck it and do it anyway?”

Renee's head swings around, birdlike, and she stares at Allison like it's the first time, years ago, when she was wary of having new roommates but forcing that serene smile onto her face all the same, when Allison looked and saw a goalie she could trust to shut down the goal and then looked more and saw—her closest friend, the woman she fell in love with by accident, her savior if she believed in any of that shit. 

“We're strong enough for that,” Allison says. “I know we are.”

Renee nods.

Allison sits down next to her, slow, careful. Renee's head is still turned to the side, and she watches Allison the whole time. They sit like that, inches apart, for what feels like an eon before Renee moves forward. Her actions, as ever, are careful, micro-movements at most, breath warm against Allison's face. She's waiting. It's a question.

Allison closes the gap. 

Kissing Renee is always the same; her lips are soft, but every inch of her body is steel, tense muscle honed by hours at the gym. She kisses like she's answering a dozen questions at once and asking a dozen more, inquisitive mouth always probing, testing for reactions, eliciting the ones it already knows are there. Allison leans forward, braces herself with a hand on Renee's other side, lets herself remember how much she always liked this. Renee's fingers find their way up to the Allison's neck and hang there, loose and soft, thumb against Allison's pulse. 

“Okay?” Renee breathes, and Allison can't find her voice so she only nods in response, brings her mouth back to Renee's.

They might be there for only a moment, or they might be there for a year. When they pull apart, Allison doesn't know if she's surprised or not that the sun hasn't come up yet, that they're still shrouded in darkness, that she's dizzy and breathless and lightheaded. 

“Fuck it,” Renee says. They've known each other for, what, like nine years? And Allison's sure she's never heard Renee say the word fuck before. 

“Yeah?” Allison says. “Not just because we're—” She waves a hand in the air to try and convey at least three meanings, not just because they're in Germany, not just because they're both turned on, not just because they're both lonely and miserable and awful at this even after years.

Renee must understand, because her fingers at Allison's throat are tighter, not tight enough to hurt, just—reassuring. She kisses the corner of Allison's mouth, the side of Allison's face, her earlobe, the spot just above her own thumb on Allison's neck. 

“You said it in past tense earlier,” Renee says.

“What are you talking about?” Allison says, distracted by the motions of Renee's mouth, soft and careful and hot and all over the place like it always is, by Renee's breath at the base of her throat.

“Loved. You said you loved me.”

“I love you,” Allison says. “Present tense.”

“I love you too,” Renee says. “I miss you. Present tense.”

“Okay,” Allison says. “It's going to work.”

Renee's fingers tighten again, and she answers Allison with another kiss. Allison presses forward until she's half in Renee's lap, and then Renee falls backward and takes Allison with her.

“I love you,” Renee murmurs, barely intelligible. “It's going to work.”

**Author's Note:**

> Me: I want everything to be Soft Gay Fluff.  
> Also me: Why Not Make Everyone Miserable
> 
> Title is from a bon iver song.
> 
> Happy holidays!
> 
> Come talk to me on tumblr ([fandom](http://wilsherejack.tumblr.com) | [main](http://osaudade.tumblr.com)). Please leave a comment if you enjoyed or spotted a typo!


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